First Person vs. Third Person Perspective in Digital Games: Do Player Preferences Affect Immersion?

Contemporary digital game developers offer a variety of games for the diverse tastes of their customers. Although the gaming experience often depends on one's preferences, the same may not apply to the level of their immersion. It has been argued whether the player perspective can influence the level of player's involvement with the game. The aim of this study was to research whether interacting with a game in first person perspective is more immersive than playing in the third person point of view (POV). The set up to test the theory involved participants playing a role-playing game in either mode, naming their preferred perspective, and subjectively evaluating their immersive experience. The results showed that people were more immersed in the game play when viewing the game world through the eyes of the character, regardless of their preferred perspectives

The Placebo Effect in Digital Games

Play-testing of digital games is a crucial part of any game development process, used to gather feedback about the game and correct any existing and potential flaws with the design. However, due to the nature of human subject testing, the feedback being collected in such experiments is prone to biases. Players' expectations play a great role in dictating their gaming experience, which means the information players receive before trying a new game, as well as the knowledge they already possess, may affect their perception and experience of the game. Two studies were conducted in order to evaluate how priming players to expect a game technology can positively influence their experience. The results supported the hypothesis that even basic instructions can change players' perception of the game, and lead to a higher level of perceived immersion when knowing that the game contains an improved feature, the adaptive artificial intelligence (AI), while it is not present in the game

Adaptation in Digital Games: The Effect of Challenge Adjustment on Player Performance and Experience

Good gaming experiences hinge on players being able to have a balance between challenge and skill. However, achieving that balance is challenging, so dynamic difficulty adjustment offers the opportunity to provide better gaming experiences through adapting the challenge in the game to suit an individual’s capabilities. The risk though is that in adapting the difficulty, players do not get a true sense of challenge, but rather some tailored, perhaps watered down experience. In this note, we report on a study, in which we used time manipulation as a method of simple adaptation in order to explore its effect on player experience (PX) and performance. Volunteers played a game in which the timer was adjusted based on their performance in the game, however they were not aware of the feature. The results showed that players in the experimental group found the game more immersive. This provides empirical support that dynamic difficulty adjustment could be used to improve the PX

A comparison of variable valve strategies at part load for throttled and un-throttled SI engine configurations

The presented work concerns the study of the fuel consumption and emissions benefits achieved at part load by employing a fully variable valve train in a 1.6L SI gasoline engine. The benefits achieved when using variable valve timing alone, and combined with an early intake closing strategy for un-throttled operation were explored in order to highlight the merits of throttle versus un-throttled engine operation in conjunction with variable valve timing and lift. In addition, particular interest was given to the presence of internal Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) and its ability to reduce pumping loss at part load. An engine model employing multiple sub models to handle variable valve operation was constructed using a commercial gas dynamics engine code, allowing detailed analysis of three valve strategies. Using the engine model, a theoretical study validated by experimentally available data was carried out to study key valve timing cases. A detailed breakdown of the mechanisms present in each case allowed a comprehensive understanding of the influence of valve timing on gas exchange efficiency and fuel consumption

The Convergence of Player Experience Questionnaires

Player experience is an important field of digital games research to understand how games influence players. A common way to directly measure players’ reported experiences is through questionnaires. However, the large number of questionnaires currently in use introduces several challenges both in terms of selecting suitable measures and comparing results across studies. In this paper, we review some of the most widely known and used questionnaires and focus on the immersive experience questionnaire (IEQ), the game engagement questionnaire (GEQ), and the player experience of need satisfaction (PENS), with the aim to position each of them in relation to each other. This was done through an online survey, in which we gathered 270 responses from players about their most recent experience of a digital game. Our findings show considerable convergence between these three questionnaires and that there is room to refine them into a more widely applicable measure of general game engagement

Subjective information visualizations

Information Visualizations (InfoViz) are systems that require high levels of cognitive processing. They revolve around the notion of decoding and interpreting visual patterns in order to achieve certain goals. We argue that purely designing for the visual will not allow for optimum experiences since there is more to InfoViz than just the visual. Interaction is a key to achieving higher levels of knowledge. In this position paper we present a different perspective on the underlying meaning of interaction, where we describe it as incorporating both the visual and the physical activities. By physical activities we mean the physical actions upon the physical input device/s. We argue that interaction is the key element for supporting users’ subjective experiences hence these experiences should first be understood. All the discussions in this paper are based upon on going work in the field of visualizing the literature knowledge domain (LKDViz)

Haptic Experience and the Design of Drawing Interfaces

Haptic feedback has the potential to enhance users’ sense of being engaged and creative in their artwork. Current work on providing haptic feedback in computer-based drawing applications has focused mainly on the realism of the haptic sensation rather than the users’ experience of that sensation in the context of their creative work. We present a study that focuses on user experience of three haptic drawing interfaces. These interfaces were based on two different haptic metaphors, one of which mimicked familiar drawing tools (such as pen, pencil or crayon on smooth or rough paper) and the other of which drew on abstract descriptors of haptic experience (roughness, stickiness, scratchiness and smoothness). It was found that users valued having control over the haptic sensation; that each metaphor was preferred by approximately half of the participants; and that the real world metaphor interface was considered more helpful than the abstract one, whereas the abstract interface was considered to better support creativity. This suggests that future interfaces for artistic work should have user-modifiable interaction styles for controlling the haptic sensation